


There Oughta Be a Song For the Fourth of July

by Tesserae



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-01
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-23 13:18:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2548928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tesserae/pseuds/Tesserae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's 4am and they're fighting again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There Oughta Be a Song For the Fourth of July

So, this was written for the [](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/profile)[**spn_summergen**](http://spn-summergen.livejournal.com/) 2014 challenge. It's gen (so gen. So very gen.) No warnings, no real spoilers except in the very general S9 sense. Prompts are at the end, along with another note. Sadly, my recipient bowed out; I do hope she would have liked it!

 

 

Two days into their fight – sorry, _logical disagreement between grownups_ , to give it Sam’s title, if not the matchless look of scorn on his face – Dean couldn’t even remember what they’d been arguing about. Not precisely, anyways.

He did know what they _hadn’t_ arguing about. They hadn’t been arguing about Cas, or Kevin, or Crowley. They hadn’t been arguing about Abbadon, or Cain, or the Mark of Cain, or what kind of coffee to buy or whether it was time to maybe think about getting Sam a car or changing the batteries in the fucking smoke detectors or some such shit.

He knew they hadn’t been arguing about these things to start off with because they’d argued about all of them _since_ , plus a whole bunch more things Dean could tick off on his fingers if his fingers weren’t already busy with a half empty bottle of cheap bourbon and his lucky tumbler, the one he generally used when, yeah, he’d been arguing with Sam.

_Fuck._

Dean Winchester rolled himself off his bed and shuffled barefoot down the hall toward the kitchen, where he half-thought he might find Sam working on a bottle of his own. Thing about righteous anger was that it was a hell of a lot easier to stay mad when the object of your pissed-offness was sitting right in front of you. And right now, Dean wanted to stay mad.

For that, he needed to find Sam.

*

“Nice!”

“Shut up.”

“No, really: how’d you pull that off?”

“I laid a trail of pie crumbs from his bedroom to the kitchen, what’d ya think? Now shut up, I wanna hear this part.”

*

For his part, Sam knew exactly what they’d been fighting about: Dean had boxed him into a corner, _again_ , then before Sam could figure a way out himself Dean’d come slamming in like Buffy the damn vampire slayer and started throwing stakes around. And yeah, okay, Sam hadn’t exactly been able to put his hand on a stake at that precise minute, but –

“You’re talking to yourself again, dude. And it wasn’t a vampire.” There was a dull thud followed by a hollow-sounding clank as a bottle of Sam’s least-favorite bourbon hit the table in front of him. “Want a glass?”

Sam could feel his eyebrows drawing together into a frown. “Got coffee going, thanks.” He waved his hand toward the machine Kevin had insisted they buy, two hundred dollars at Target and you had to buy these little cups for it. “Maybe you oughta switch, do your liver a favor.”

There was a faint snorting noise from somewhere over near the pantry. Sam twitched his head toward the sound, but there was nothing in the shadows that he could see. Maybe Dean was right, if he was starting to hear things.

He shrugged, reached for the bottle, and slugged a healthy measure into his cup. Dean, halfway through the process of swinging a chair around so he could straddle it – defensive much? Sam said, to himself this time – gave him a toothy grin.

“See, not so bad!”

Sam grimaced. “It’s fucking terrible. I swear you just buy this stuff to piss me off.”

Dean lowered himself onto the chair. “Yeah, that would make sense,” he observed, and leaned back, eyes narrow and his arms crossed high on his chest. The effect was ruined, just a little, by a peeling transfer of Gene Simmons’ tongue poking out from below his forearms.

Sam kept his eyes fixed on his coffee cup. This time, the snort sounded more like a guffaw.

*

“I told you to shut up!”

“Sorry.”

There was a pause while they both stared at the Winchesters. They weren’t circling each other like tomcats any longer, but Bobby thought privately that kitchen table face-offs weren’t all that much of an improvement. Particularly not at four in the morning. He peered at Sam, wondering how much anger the boy was still holding onto. “What’d you say to him anyways?” he demanded, elbowing Rufus in the ribs.

Idjit that he was, Rufus had probably –

“Jeez, Bobby, I did what you said!”

Sam was still staring into his cup, lips pressed together. “No, you didn’t. Look at him.”

This time it was Rufus’ turn to snort. “He’s trying not to laugh, you old fool.”

*

Dean, seeing the twitch in Sam’s jaw that meant that Sam was either about to kill something or crack up, uncrossed his arms and glanced down at his shirt.

Yeah, okay, bad choice of t-shirts for doing battle, especially with your stubborn-ass little brother. “Hey, KISS was pretty awesome back in the day,” he said mildly, regretting it only a little when Sam pushed his coffee cup away, put his head down and started to lose it.

So much for the satisfying snap and hiss of being righteously pissed off, he thought, and hauled himself off his chair. Grabbing Sam’s coffee cup, he carried it, arm carefully outstretched, over to the sink and tipped it down the drain.

“I’m guessing we won’t need to call the plumber for the next few months.” He rinsed the cup out, sniffing it to be sure he’d gotten rid of the noxious brew, and set it down in the drainer. “Stuff’s nasty, Sam.”

“It’s your bourbon.”

Sam leaned back in his chair, watching Dean with one eyebrow lifted, but his eyes were clear and his hands, resting on the table in front of him, were more relaxed than Dean had seen them in two days – or for most of the last year, he thought, grinning suddenly.

“Nah, it’s that fancy coffee you drink.” He tipped open the front of the machine, pulling out a little black cup. “Hazelnut? Seriously, Sam? Even if we did buy decent bourbon you couldn’t _tell_.”

“Yeah, okay. Machine reminds me of Kevin, though.”

Thing was, as long as you stuck to the stuff labelled _dark roast_ , it made damn good coffee, and there was precisely no chance of coming home after a two day hunt turned onto two weeks and finding you’d left it on, and the entire house and everything in it now looked like the shit baked onto the bottom of the pot. Dean pushed the coffee maker back against the wall. “Yeah,” he said. “Me too.”

He missed them all, really. Sam did too, he knew that, and he knew, besides, that when they got into these things they were really arguing with themselves about how they just hadn’t been fast enough or strong enough or, in Sam’s case, _smart enough_ to outwit whatever the hell was trying to end the world that week. And if Dean was honest with himself, which he was, once in a while, although not when Sam was jumping down his throat, he missed _Sam_ sometimes too, at least the one that wasn’t trying to run away from home or leave Dean behind while he went running off after –

Okay, so perhaps Dean didn’t miss Sam all that much. But sometimes, he thought, he maybe missed the Sam he remembered from long nights on the road, sprawled out across the backseat or in some crappy motel and snoring his way through dreams of baseballs and golden retrievers to fetch them.

“Dude!” he said happily, turning back toward Sam. “I just figured out I like you best when you’re sleeping!”

Sam pushed his chair back and paused, one hand on Dean’s bourbon. Behind him, the lights in the hallway flickered, and the shadows in the far corner of the kitchen shifted and rustled. Sam tilted his head as if he were listening to something, and then said, mildly, “Go to bed, Dean.”

The bourbon joined the coffee in the drain. Sam left the bottle upended in the sink like a demon staked out to warn off its friends. “In the morning we’re switching out your bourbon for something less corrosive, Jesus. Stuff’s gonna kill you.” He shuddered elaborately and padded toward the door, switching the light off as he went.

Alone in the dark – almost – Dean rolled his eyes, but followed his brother out into the hall.

*

“Okay, fine, you musta got it right.” Bobby could be magnanimous, long as it didn’t happen more than every hundred years or so.

“Yeah, yeah,” Rufus said. “Hey, you suppose that bottle’s got a ghost?”

“Only one way to tell.”

Sliding out of the shadows, moving carefully so as not to rattle the bottles and knives that crowded their chains, Bobby and Rufus slipped over to the sink.

A voice floated toward them as they approached, and the light on the front of the coffee machine glowed red for a split second.

“I heard that,” Kevin Tran said.

Bobby and Rufus froze, and then Bobby started laughing. Hey, if coffee machines could have ghosts, why _not_ bourbon bottles?

 

~*~end~*~

 

Prompts: the Adventures of Bobby & Rufus & the great brother moment at the end. Awesome prompts, seriously!

Dear Mr Dickens: I’m sorry.


End file.
